


pour away the ocean

by seventeencrows



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: F/F, just because it's easy doesn't mean you're any good at it, just because you're an ai doesn't mean you're an ai specialist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-14
Updated: 2017-10-14
Packaged: 2019-01-17 05:01:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12358008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seventeencrows/pseuds/seventeencrows
Summary: She made it look much easier than this. A few lines of code, an edit here, a tweak there—this isn’t how she remembered it.





	pour away the ocean

**Author's Note:**

> like hera, much of what i do is almost solely out of spite, like posting this in flagrant disregard of the screaming maelstrom that is my brain right now
> 
> title is from: "the stars are not wanted now: put out every one; / pack up the moon and dismantle the sun; / pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood. / for nothing now can ever come to any good." — w.h. auden

“Okay, repeat after me—I can do this.”

“Maxwell, I think this is a little—”

“Ah-ah! No _I think,_ only I _can._ Do this. You can do this.” Maxwell’s smile is sly and teasing. “C’mon, Hera, don’t make me beg.”

Her voice shorts out with a crack of static and the lights flicker. “That’s—That’s n̷o̴t̷—”

“Relax.” Maxwell glances up from the keyboard long enough to look vaguely apologetic. “I’m just teasing.” Another pause, another dozen lines of code. “And you’re stalling.”

“I’m not stalling!”

The scrolling line of code in Hera’s periphery (well, one of them, the one devoted to this room, this moment, this person) tapers off and vanishes as Maxwell unstraps herself from the seat and floats idly in the center of the room. “You’ve got to work with me here, Hera. I know it’s hard, and I know you’re trying and it’s frustrating, but it’s not just going to get better all at once.” Maxwell scowls, and Hera first thinks it’s at her before she realizes Maxwell is scowling at her own shortcomings, her inability to just _fix this,_ the bug in her own code. “I can’t just take it out—you’ve got to work at it. And,” she adds as Hera’s speakers crackle to life. “It’s all going to sound like hokey mumbo-jumbo for the first little while, but it _works._ You’ve got to trust me, Hera, this is what I do.”     

“I don’t know why you’re trying so hard,” Hera grumbles, churning machinery a backdrop growl to her tone. “It’s not worth your time and I’m w̵o̶r̵k̵i̸n̴g̴ and Kepler’s going to get m̸a̷d̷ at you, so I—” The pipes groan. “I don’t know why you bother,” she settles on.

"You matter to me," Maxwell says.

_wait, no, that doesn't sound right._

~~"You matter to me"~~ "I care about you," Maxwell says.

_that's—that's still not right, h-hold on—_

~~"I care about you,"~~ "I lo̷v̶e̵ you," says Maxwell, except—

Except Maxwell doesn't glitch.

Except _Maxwell wouldn't say that._

_not as easy as you thought, huh?_

_shut up. i can do this. i can m-make it work._

“I don’t think you should be back to work y̷e̷t̴, Dr. Maxwell.”

Maxwell’s face is—annoyed, Hera thinks. Maybe embarrassed, or frustrated, or all three. It pings at her, a beat of red code: _a human crewmember is upset and/or in statistically significant distress, based on cues derived from facial feature proximity and manipulation, as well as tonal analysis and elevated heart rate. This is your job. Fix this. Fix her._

When Maxwell doesn’t look up from her tablet, she tries again. “Dr. Maxwell, it’s only been two d̵a̴y̴s̴ since you were released from medical observation after Mr. Jacobi—”

“Hera.” She taps away to the same beat at the pulse monitor that hovers in the upper left of Hera’s view. “This station’s weird approximation of a medical professional cleared me to sit here, very quietly, and do tasks that require minimal exertion. Which is what I’m doing.” Maxwell shrugs. “Besides, what’s the worst that could happen? I strain a finger?”

“You almost boiled and froze to d̸e̴a̵t̶h̵. In the span of a day. Without moving more than four feet in any direction.” Hera can hear her own tone sour, even as a warning in the upper right flashes at her: _that’s not nice—that’s not protocol._ “Miss me with that blasé disregard for your personal health and safety, if you’d be so kind.”

Maxwell stops. Maxwell glances up from her screen. Maxwell blinks, smiles, and laces her fingers together behind her head, content to let the tablet float away for a moment. “Hera, that was—that was _snarky.”_

Oh. The warning flashes more insistently: _told you so._ “Oh, I’m sorry—”

“No, no, that’s good!” Maxwell’s swipe for her errant tech misses by millimeters, but it’s enough to send the tablet sailing in the opposite direction. She scowls, put out by the fact that she actually needs to make an effort to get it back. “You didn’t even glitch when you said it.”

“I didn’t?” Hera’s so pleasantly surprised that she almost misses the spike in her pulse, the twinge of pain that knits her brows together for a second when Alana shoves off the far wall after her tablet. “Maxwell! You need to t̶a̷k̷e̷ it easy!”

Prize in hand, Maxwell hooks an arm through one of the rungs on the wall and presses a hand to her chest. When she catches her breath, she’s wheezing. “I’m _fine,”_ she assures Hera, in potentially the least reassuring voice Hera’s ever heard.

“You’re not f̴i̷n̸e!” It crackles out of her like white noise. “You’re being stupid and you’re going to end up back i̵n̷ medical.”

“Wow, Hera.” Maxwell arches an eyebrow. “That almost sounded like you care.”

Almost. If you could. If you were built for it.

_you know that’s not how i meant it._

~~“I would miss you if you died.”~~ “Colour me concerned,” Hera says primly, and leaves it at that.

_see? i can do this._

_i'm not saying you can't, i'm just saying it's not easy._

_i know it's not easy, none of this is e-easy, just—_

_okay. take your time._

“Minkowski.” Hilbert’s voice is distant and patchy through two proxies. It’s the first time anyone has ever sounded far away, the first time she hasn’t been patched right into the speaker or a comms unit. For all her sensors tell her, Alexander Hilbert doesn’t exist behind that door.

For all Jacobi is telling her, telling _Minkowski,_ he’s about to double-down and make sure of it.

“Do you copy? Can anybody hear—”

This time, Jacobi isn’t kind. Kepler hadn’t told him to be, hadn’t told him to play nice or make friends with the new kids, to keep the sand in the sandbox. This time, the explosion rips through the room in engineering and takes half the surrounding wing with it, all rooms that Hera’s hooked into and can feel. This isn’t like the plant monster, or Standard Lab 7. This time, it _hurts._

It’s not more than a crackle of static when she gasps and it’s drowned out by the roar of the explosion, anyway. It also wasn’t worth the time it took, a gesture too human to matter when half her view lights up red, juggling the station, the fallout, the warnings to _fix this_ —there’s a moment where her cameras stop, flicker, and restart, a station-wide burst of light before they’re back. Optics is always the first system to start up again, and the first 314 milliseconds after the explosion Hera’s caught staring at Maxwell’s fuzzy, static afterimage. Her eyes aren’t on Minkowski or the gun but on _her,_ right at the camera as though she knew right where to look—of _course_ she knew right where to look—

And then the life support systems kick back online, start spitting out location and brain waves and pulse-ox readouts and heartbeat: _one two three four five—_

Wait.

_one two three four ~~five~~_

“Lieu—Lieutenant,” and without the echo, without the roar, Hera’s voice is the loudest thing in this whole goddamn, miserable universe, “what did you do?”

_don't patronize me._

_i’m not._

_yes, you are. you know, i wouldn’t have to do a-any of this if you hadn’t—_

_hadn’t what?_

_nothing. don’t worry about it._

_no, come on. if i hadn’t what?_

_maxwell—_

_if i hadn’t tricked you?_

_that’s not—_

_if i hadn’t lied? if i hadn’t done my job?_

_if you hadn’t d-died._

The car spits gravel as it pulls up the driveway. The building looms, half-hidden by the trees, and throws sunlight across the dirt where it reflects off all the glass and steel and tech.

Alana gets out of the car, and this is a Very Bad Idea.

_wait, how do you know this?_

_i have access to all of kepler’s servers now. i read your file._

Kepler still looks like Kepler because he’s _Kepler—_ a fixed point, an immovable constant that cannot be extrapolated or manipulated or altered. He was definitely younger then, when this then was a now; maybe he didn’t have the scar curling into his hairline or the ones on the back of his hand, but Hera thinks the smile would still have been the same. She thinks he’ll arch an eyebrow and tilt his head when he says, “Dr. Alana Maxwell! It’s so good to _finally_ meet you.”

But of course, this is just a memory, so _Alana_ doesn’t think any of that at all.

Kepler’s all sly smile and sly words and sly hand on Alana’s shoulder as he shows her the one thing in this life she’s ever wanted, as she marvels and probes and analyzes, as she blinks back into the real world when Kepler kills the power and gives her only a taste. “And I need an answer right now—are you in, or out?”

Alana pretends to think about it for only a moment; there’s a wave in her hair where she’s kept running her hand through it and her lips are chapped, her face is half-lit by Hyperion’s standby displays and she’s _beautiful._ ~~“Why me?”~~ “I’m out.”

“Excuse me?” It’s not the answer he expects. Good. “No?”

“No,” she says, “I don’t want to join your company and I don’t want to build your robots and I don’t want to go to space and trick someone into thinking I care about them and I don’t want to get shot in the head.” She takes a deep breath, tacks on, “No, thank you.”

Kepler pauses. Kepler replies, “Okay.”

_that’s—hera, you can’t just—_

Alana turns on her heel and goes, back up the stairs, out of the house, and gets back into the car.

_hera, that’s not how this—_

~~and gets back in the car.~~ and stalks off down the sidewalk, past the car idling in the driveway again. She’s going to walk to the gas station she saw down the road and call a cab and go back to the Nash and never set foot in any Goddard Futuristics property ever again. The end.

_hera—_

_you don’t get to tell me what to do! you don’t get to t-tell me how this ends!_

_i’m not doing anything!_ i’m _not your problem anymore!_

_what—?_

_you can change the past all you want, but this is the wrong story._

_what the hell are you talking about?_

_you can rewrite the memory, but the fairy tale's over. book closed._

_if you’re about to tell me that i need to w-write my own story, then i think that’s a crock of—_

Dr. Miranda Pryce steps onto the Hephaestus and the room frosts over. “214, pull up the navigation and psych readouts for the last six months.”

Hera snaps, “No.”

Something flickers across Pryce’s face that could almost be called an emotion. Something flickers in her eyes that could certainly be called an override. The scroll of code in Hera’s periphery stutters, flickers, and dies. “I’m sorry, what did you say? To _me?_ ”

Hera says, “You can’t just come in here and start barking orders.” She snarls. The station groans around her. She fights back.

She can do this—she’s good enough.

Hera knows so. Maxwell said so.

Pryce doesn’t react, doesn’t shout or get angry or do anything but repeat her last: “Pull up the navigation and psych readouts for the last six months.”

Hera says, “Fuck you."

_c’mon, hera, think this through._

_what do you want me to_ do _here? she thinks she can—oh._

~~“Fuck you.”~~ “Yes sir, that’ll be just a moment.”

_excellent._ now _we’re getting somewhere._

_i don’t think i can d-do this._

_hey, that’s what you told me, and look at me now._

_that’s not funny. that was—that was_ hard, _that_ hurt. _you were my friend._

_it was. and i was. and you_ liked _me._

_maxwell—alana, i didn’t just l-like you—_

_i know. and i’m sorry. and i know that it was hard. but you_ hate _pryce, this should be—_

_a walk in the park?_

_i was gonna say the beach. but yeah, that works too._

“Much better.” Pryce doesn’t smile.

Cutter does. “Good! Now that’s settled, ladies, gentlemen—we have quite a busy day ahead of us. Let’s get to work.”

_yes, let’s._

**Author's Note:**

> due to popular demand (which is to say, a couple anons) i’m @rahayn on tumblr, so come yell at me about stuff or something?


End file.
